Art Appraisal Blog

Advances in payment infrastructure are enabling governments to channel payments through multiple providers, giving people greater choice over how to receive payments. This is an important shift with implications for financial services providers, recipients of government payments and financial inclusion.

Digital payments are central to the global COVID-19 response, but the agent networks that distribute these funds are struggling to remain open. Here are three questions policy makers must answer to ensure agents reach as many people as possible.

As COVID-19 accelerates the shift to digital finance, we need to make sure women are not excluded.

The consumer consent model for data privacy and protection is broken. It’s time for a new data paradigm whereby financial services providers and data collectors take greater responsibility for protecting customers’ data.

Most digital financial services users require agents to help them switch between worlds of cash and digital currency. Global evidence suggests six principles for building viable agent networks in rural areas home to poor, financially excluded populations.

The story of National Payments Corporation of India sheds light on the quick and robust transformation of India’s payment systems. The lessons learned from the NPCI success story can be useful for policy makers in financial inclusion and other markets.

Consent forms are the backbone of data protection efforts worldwide, but there’s a problem: no one reads them. To protect people’s data, policy makers must go beyond consent.

The COVID-19 pandemic has underlined the need for a universal and portable social protection system that can uniquely verify people and deliver benefits efficiently and at scale.

In the first blog from our new series on lessons from India for the world, we will look at the basic components of the digitized G2P ecosystem that enabled India to support beneficiaries even when the whole country was under lockdown. We will follow this with detailed modules on each component.

As part of its program to facilitate exposure visits to India for governments across the globe, MSC has documented India's journey towards financial inclusion and digital governance.